January 15, 2007

Padilla 3: A Feature, Not A Bug

by hilzoy

In the first part of this series, I described the torture of Jose Padilla, and started to try to explain it. I began by describing the "mosaic theory" of intelligence gathering, according to which one should try to collect little bits of intelligence and fit them together into a bigger picture. In the second part, I described the KUBARK manual, a 1963 CIA handbook that has been described as the 'Bible of interrogation', and argued that the techniques of interrogation it recommends have been used on Padilla and others.

The KUBARK manual recommends that interrogators first try to produce 'regression' in detainees, and then provide a rationalization that will allow them to escape by cooperating. The manual describes interrogations that have a clear endpoint: the subject cooperates. In my last post, I argued that since 9/11, interrogation has been freed from the constraints that normally circumscribe it: the legal system in the US, and the difficulty of holding detainees for long periods of time abroad. Under these conditions, merging the KUBARK approach to interrogation with the mosaic theory will produce an effort to induce more and more regression, without any clear end at all. In this post I want to try to explain what this means. Specifically, I want to argue for the following thesis:

That our government designed a system of interrogation whose express purpose was to inflict serious psychological damage on people we were interrogating.

Think about that.

Moreover: since this was a CIA manual, the people the CIA was trying to drive insane would have been kidnapped, not arrested and convicted. Therefore, as Publius notes, they might, for all we know, be completely innocent. (Especially since this was during the period when the very same CIA was hatching plans to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding conch shell, and to give him a diving suit "infected with a fungus that would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease." Hardly their soberest moment.)

Anyways: let's start with the term 'regression'.

'Regression' is a psychoanalytic term meaning a return to an earlier, more childlike or infantile, state. Some versions of regression are benign. For instance: while I take normal colds and flu in stride, when I get really, really sick I find myself thinking: I want my Mommy! And this isn't just because I love her, and she's great to talk to, and all that. No: it's because I want her to come padding up the stairs and bring me saltines and ginger ale and make everything all better. It doesn't matter that I know that my Mom, however wonderful, can't make everything all better. I have regressed to a more childlike state, and all that is completely irrelevant.

This harmless state of mind is not what the KUBARK manual says that interrogators should try to induce, however. Here's how the KUBARK manual describes the regression it aims at (sec. VII.A.7, emphasis added):

"Obviously, many resistant subjects of counterintelligence interrogation cannot be brought to cooperation, or even to compliance, merely through pressures which they generate within themselves or through the unreinforced effect of the interrogation situation. Manipulative techniques - still keyed to the individual but brought to bear upon him from outside himself - then become necessary. It is a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these techniques, which can succeed even with highly resistant sources, are in essence methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence. All of the techniques employed to break through an interrogation roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple isolation to hypnosis and narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up the process of regression. As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away in a reversed chronological order, so that the characteristics most recently acquired - which are also the characteristics drawn upon by the interrogatee in his own defense - are the first to go. As Gill and Brenman have pointed out, regression is basically a loss of autonomy."

And (sec. IX.B):

"All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression. As Hinkle notes in "The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function"(7), the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man: "... the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to meet new, challenging, and complex situations, to deal with trying interpersonal relations, and to cope with repeated frustrations. Relatively small degrees of homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep loss, or anxiety may impair these functions." As a result, "most people who are exposed to coercive procedures will talk and usually reveal some information that they might not have revealed otherwise." (...)

Farber says that the response to coercion typically contains "... at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread." Prisoners "... have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs, and experience the emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and anxiety.... Among the [American] POW's pressured by the Chinese Communists, the DDD syndrome in its full-blown form constituted a state of discomfort that was well-nigh intolerable." (11). If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him."

(The CIA seems to have liked the 'debility, dependency, and dread' formulation so much that in their 1983 manual (pdf, secs. L 3-5), they divided up all coercive techniques into these three groups.)

In any case, what KUBARK interrogation aims at is to induce regression to the point at which the subject can no longer resist. Or, in layman's language: to smash someone's identity and character into tiny bits, leaving that person literally helpless and unable to hold out against the interrogator. This is, quite literally, a manual on how to drive people crazy.

***

The techniques described in the KUBARK manual grew out of Cold War experiments in psychology prompted by the fear that the USSR and China had developed techniques of mind control. (Many were part of the MK-ULTRA program in which, among other things, the CIA experimented with LSD on unsuspecting people.) The resulting techniques involve a combination of several features, which I will discuss separately.

(1) Sensory Deprivation:Here's a description of some of the sensory deprivation experiments of the 1950s and early 60s:

"In the deepest darkest days of the Cold War initially as a defensive move, the CIA launched a massive mind control project to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with research expenses reaching up to $1 billion a year at peak in the 1950s and the first breakthrough in this massive project came at McGill University. It was actually a joint Canadian, British, US effort, top-secret effort, and Dr Donald O. Hebb at McGill University found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in a subject within 48 hours. Now, what had the doctor done? Hypnosis, electroshock, LSD, drugs? No. None of the above. All Dr Hebb did was take student volunteers at McGill University where he was head of Psychology, put them in comfortable airconditioned cubicles and put goggles, gloves and ear muffs on them. In 24 hours the hallucinations started. In 48 hours they suffered a complete breakdown. Dr Hebb noted they suffered a disintegration of personality. Just goggles, gloves and ear muffs and this discovered the foundation, or the key technique which has been applied under extreme conditions at Guantanamo. The technique of sensory disorientation. I've tracked down some of the original subjects in Dr Hebb's experiments of 1952 and men now in their 70s still suffer psychological damage from just two days of isolation with goggles, gloves and ear muffs."

"In these studies (Brownfield, 1965; Solomon, et al., 1961), subjects were placed in a situation designed to maximally reduce perceptually informative external stimuli (e.g., light-proof, soundproof rooms, cardboard tubes surrounding the arms and hands to reduce proprioceptive and tactile sensation, and so on). The research revealed that characteristic symptoms generally developed in such settings. These symptoms included perceptual distortions and illusions in multiple spheres, vivid fantasies, often accompanied by strikingly vivid hallucinations in multiple spheres, derealization experiences, and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. What was also clear, however, was that while some subjects tolerated such experiences well, many did not, and a characteristic syndrome was observed, including not only the above symptoms, but also included cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies which were often accompanied by fearful hallucinations, and with decreasing capacity to maintain an observing, reality-testing ego function. In some cases, an overt psychosis supervened with persecutory delusions and, in some cases, a marked dissociative, catatoniclike stupor (delirium) with mutism developed. EEG recordings confirmed the presence of abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium."

And here, finally, is the Kubark manual describing these experiments:

"Drs. Wexler, Mendelson, Leiderman, and Solomon conducted a somewhat similar experiment on seventeen paid volunteers. These subjects were "... placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress.... The vents of the respirator were left open, so that the subject breathed for himself. His arms and legs were enclosed in comfortable but rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact. The subject lay on his back and was unable to see any part of his body. The motor of the respirator was run constantly, producing a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus. The room admitted no natural light, and artificial light was minimal and constant." (42) Although the established time limit was 36 hours and though all physical needs were taken care of, only 6 of the 17 completed the stint. The other eleven soon asked for release. Four of these terminated the experiment because of anxiety and panic; seven did so because of physical discomfort. The results confirmed earlier findings that (1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects. (...)

These findings suggest - but by no means prove - the following theories about solitary confinement and isolation:

1. The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more rapidly and deeply will the interrogatee be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.

2. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. How soon it appears and how strong it is depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual.

3. The interrogator can benefit from the subject's anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role. (7)

4. The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject's tendencies toward compliance."

Massive amounts of fear, anxiety, and stress were extremely common among subjects in the sensory deprivation experiments, as were hallucinations. (Half of the subjects in the study described above had visual hallucinations, and that study only lasted for 36 hours.) Most of the sensory deprivation experiments from this period that I've been able to track down report experimentally induced psychosis.

These were, basically, experiments that drove people crazy, and the authors of the KUBARK manual knew it.

(2) Solitary Confinement/Isolation: Here's a description of Cold War studies of the effects of isolation (pdf, p. 27):

"As noted in the body of this declaration, in the 1950's the U.S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency sponsored a great deal of research on these issues; Hinkle and Wolff (1956) published results of extensive research done by them for the Department of Defense. The paper documented interrogation techniques of the Soviet KGB in regard to the incarceration of political prisoners, and the Chinese communists' imprisonment of American prisoners of war in Korea.

The report indicated that the KGB operated detention prisons, many of which were "modern . . . well built and spotlessly clean . . . (with) attached medical facilities and rooms for the care of sick detainees. An exercise yard is a standard facility. Incarceration in these prisons is almost universally in solitary confinement in a cell approximately 10' x 6' in size. An almost invariable feature of the management of any important suspect under detention is a period of total isolation in a detention cell." (p. 126)

This isolation was seen as a central feature of the imprisonment:
"The effects upon prisoners of the regimen in the isolation cell are striking.

... A major aspect of this prison experience is isolation. ... (In the cells) his internal as well as external life is disrupted (and) ... he develops a predictable group of symptoms, which might almost be called 'disease syndrome.'"

This syndrome develops over time:

"He becomes increasingly anxious and restless and his sleep is disturbed ... The period of anxiety, hyperactivity, and apparent adjustment to the isolation routine usually continues from 1 to 3 weeks. ... The prisoner becomes increasingly dejected and dependent. He gradually gives up all spontaneous activity within his cell and ceases to care about personal appearance and actions. Finally, he sits and stares with a vacant expression, perhaps endlessly twisting a button on his coat. He allows himself to become dirty and disheveled. ... He goes through the motions of his prison routine automatically, as if he were in a daze. ... Ultimately, he seems to lose many of the restraints of ordinary behavior. He may soil himself; he weeps; he mutters. ... It usually takes from 4 to 6 weeks to produce this phenomenon in a newly imprisoned man. ... His sleep is disturbed by nightmares. Ultimately he may reach a state of depression in which he ceases to care about his personal appearance and behavior and pays very little attention to his surroundings. In this state the prisoner may have illusory experiences. A distant sound in the corridor sounds like someone calling his name. The rattle of a footstep may be interpreted as a key in the lock opening the cell. Some prisoners may become delirious and have visual hallucinations.

Not all men who first experience total isolation react in precisely this manner. In some, the symptoms are less conspicuous. In others, dejection and other despondence earlier, or later. Still others, and especially those with preexisting personality disturbances, may become frankly psychotic." (p. 129)"

Since this research was done for the CIA and DoD, I assume it was known to the authors of the KUBARK manual. (The manual shows a lot of familiarity with research in the behavioral sciences.) If the CIA has kept up with the research, as I assume it has, it would have to be aware that the evidence that isolation has horrible psychological effects has only gotten stronger and more detailed over time. According to Stuart Grassian (pdf, p. 3ff), who has written some of the standard studies, solitary confinement produces a standard syndrome, whose symptoms include:

* Hyperresponsivity to external stimuli

* Perceptual distortions, delusions, and hallucinations ("Almost a third of the prisoners described hearing voices, often in whispers, often saying frightening things to them. There were also reports of noises taking on increasing meaning and frightening significance. For example, "I hear noises, can't identify them -- starts to sound like sticks beating men, but I'm pretty sure no one is being beaten . . . I'm not sure." These perceptual changes at times became more complex and personalized: "They come by with four trays; the first has big pancakes. I think I am going to get them. Then someone comes up and gives me tiny ones -- they get real small, like silver dollars. I seem to see movements -- real fast motions in front of me. Then seems like they are doing things behind your back -- can't quite see them. Did someone just hit me? I dwell on it for hours.")

* Overt paranoia ("Almost half the prisoners interviewed reported paranoid and persecutory fears. Some of these persecutory fears were short of overt psychotic disorganization. For example: "Sometimes get paranoid -- think they meant something else. Like a remark about Italians. Dwell on it for hours. Get frantic. Like when they push buttons on the sink. Think they did it just to annoy me." In other cases this paranoia deteriorated into overt psychosis: "Spaced out. Hear singing, people's voices, 'Cut your wrists and go to Bridgewater and the Celtics are playing tonight.' I doubt myself. Is it real? . . . I suspect they are putting drugs in my food, they are putting drugs in my cell . . . The Reverend, the priest -- even you -- you're all in cahoots in the Scared Straight Program.")

* Problems with impulse control ("Slightly less than half of the prisoners reported episodes of loss of impulse control with random violence:
"I snap off the handle over absolutely nothing. Have torn up mail and pictures, throw things around. Try to control it. Know it only hurts myself." Several of these prisoners reported impulsive self-mutilation; "I cut my wrists many times in isolation. Now it seems crazy. But every time I did it, I wasn't thinking -- lost control -- cut myself without knowing what I was doing.")

This has also been studied in Supermax prisons, where the study I just linked to found horrible psychiatric problems at much greater rates than in the general population. Whereas 1.7% of the general population has hallucinations, for instance, 41% of the Supermax prisoners studied do. Many of the same symptoms appear even in much more benign settings -- there is, apparently, such a thing as ICU syndrome, for instance.

And isolation has horrible long-term consequences. Grassian again:

"Long-term studies of veterans of P.O.W. camps and of kidnapping and hostage situations have demonstrated that while many of the acute symptoms I outlined above tend to subside after release from confinement, there are also long-term effects which may persist for decades. These not only include persistent symptoms of post traumatic stress (such as flashbacks, chronic hypervigilance, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness), but also lasting personality changes -- especially including a continuing pattern of intolerance of social interaction, leaving the individual socially impoverished and withdrawn, subtly angry and fearful when forced into social interaction. (This literature is reviewed in Appendix D to this declaration.)

In addition, from time to time I have had the opportunity to evaluate individuals who had been incarcerated in solitary confinement several years previously; I have found the same pattern of personality change described above -- these individuals had become strikingly socially impoverished and experienced intense irritation with social interaction, patterns dramatically different from their functioning prior to solitary confinement."

"During the 1950s as well, two eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the CIA found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique involved, not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to stand for days at time—while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations began. Again, it you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib you will see repeated use of this method, now called “stress positions.”"

In the KUBARK manual, stress positions were not designed to drive people crazy; just to add to detainees' debility, and to provoke additional psychological conflicts within them, since the pain produced by stress positions was in some sense self-inflicted. From the KUBARK manual (IX.H):

"It has been plausibly suggested that, whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself. "In the simple torture situation the contest is one between the individual and his tormentor (.... and he can frequently endure). When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter.... As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so." (4)"

(4): Disorientation: Curiously, I haven't been able to find any Cold War research on the effects of a systematic effort to disorient people: to do what the KUBARK manual describes in Sec. VIII.A:

"If the interrogatee is under detention, the interrogator can also manipulate his environment. Merely by cutting off all other human contacts, "the interrogator monopolizes the social environment of the source."(3) He exercises the powers of an all-powerful parent, determining when the source will be sent to bed, when and what he will eat, whether he will be rewarded for good behavior or punished for being bad. The interrogator can and does make the subject's world not only unlike the world to which he had been accustomed but also strange in itself - a world in which familiar patterns of time, space, and sensory perception are overthrown."

And later:

"Some interrogatees can be regressed by persistent manipulation of time, by retarding and advancing clocks and serving meals at odd times -- ten minutes or ten hours after the last food was given. Day and night are jumbled. Interrogation sessions are similarly unpatterned the subject may be brought back for more questioning just a few minutes after being dismissed for the night. Half-hearted efforts to cooperate can be ignored, and conversely he can be rewarded for non-cooperation. (For example, a successfully resisting source may become distraught if given some reward for the "valuable contribution" that he has made.) The Alice in Wonderland technique can reinforce the effect. Two or more interrogators, questioning as a team and in relays (and thoroughly jumbling the timing of both methods) can ask questions which make it impossible for the interrogatee to give sensible, significant answers. A subject who is cut off from the world he knows seeks to recreate it, in some measure, in the new and strange environment. He may try to keep track of time, to live in the familiar past, to cling to old concepts of loyalty, to establish -- with one or more interrogators -- interpersonal relations resembling those that he has had earlier with other people, and to build other bridges back to the known. Thwarting his attempts to do so is likely to drive him deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in adult fashion."

It makes perfect sense, and it sounds horrible. I feel confident that somewhere there is a body of Cold War research that underlies this, but except for one study of Korean prisoners that emphasizes their need to create and cling to a stable role in an unfamiliar situation, and the ways in which Korean interrogators played on this need, I haven't found it.

Nonetheless, of all the parts of the KUBARK interrogation technique, this is the one that seems most obviously to constitute messing with people's heads. If you haven't read the research, it's hard to imagine how horrible prolonged sensory deprivation and isolation can be, and how rapidly they lead to serious damage. When you're already treating detainees in ways that are literally designed to drive them crazy, then adding a consistent attempt to create a world in which nothing makes any sense at all -- in which detainees are dismissed for the night and then called back for more interrogation ten minutes later; in which they are kept from knowing whether it is day or night; in which interrogators are both omnipotent and literally senseless -- just provides the crowning touch.

***

The KUBARK system of interrogation was based on a lot of research into, on the one hand, the results of horrific treatment of prisoners, and on the other, how to drive people crazy. It was designed to induce serious psychological damage. Many of the passages cited above make that clear, as does this paragraph (sec. IX.B):

"The profound moral objection to applying duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage has been stated. Judging the validity of other ethical arguments about coercion exceeds the scope of this paper. What is fully clear, however, is that controlled coercive manipulation of an interrogatee may impair his ability to make fine distinctions but will not alter his ability to answer correctly such gross questions as "Are you a Soviet agent? What is your assignment now? Who is your present case officer?""

Parts of this paragraph, including the reference to "irreversible psychological damage", are repeated in the 1983 interrogation manual at L.6.

Which is to say: the author(s) of the KUBARK manual knew that they were describing how to inflict massive psychological damage in the course of an interrogation. They didn't just break people's souls into tiny little pieces by accident; that was the whole point.

"Padilla's lawyers contend that as a result of his isolation and interrogation, their client is so mentally damaged that he is unable to assist in his own defense. He is so passive and fearful now, they maintain, that he is "like a piece of furniture."

Even at this late stage, after dozens of meetings with his lawyers, Padilla suspects that they are government agents, says Andrew Patel, who is on the legal team. Padilla may believe that the lawyers assigned to represent him are in fact "part of a continuing interrogation program."

The situation has become impossible, defense lawyers say; they've hired two psychiatric experts to examine Padilla. Both have often testified for the prosecution in criminal cases. This time they have sided with the defense.
After spending more than 25 hours with Padilla, both psychiatric experts have concluded that his isolation and interrogation have resulted in so much mental damage that he is incompetent to stand trial."

The fact that Jose Padilla has become "like a piece of furniture" is not an unforeseen effect of his interrogation. It's the whole point. It's a feature, not a bug.

Comments

Thanks, Hilzoy for this very detailed, documented observation and analysis of the effects of sensory deprivation (also observed in U.S. prisons, as you remarked...) Since you conclude that the point of such techniques of interrogation is to reduce the prisoner to becoming a piece of furniture (to crush his or her soul, I'm tempted to say), one can only ask, what can possibly be the motivation for an individual (interrogator) and the system behind him to engage in such overtly sadistic behavior ? Glenn Greenwald's recent piece about the dangerousness of a weakened George W. Bush perhaps offers some insight into the way the Bush presidency cautions this entire process : people who themselves feel belittled, humiliated and react in terms of who's tougher, stronger, smarter, etc. require a victim who must at all costs be belittled, humiliated, etc. in order for them to feel different, i.e. superior. Pretty scary how something so banal, so frighteningly ordinary can take on apocalyptic proportions, huh ? It can take on such proportions because there is no one in control, and no one willing to assume anything resembling personal responsibility for their actions in this case.

Debra: I will probably have more to say about it, all with the caveat that of course I'm just speculating. However, I think that part of the motivation behind the Cold War experiments was the idea that the Soviets and Chinese were developing Mind Control.

Experimental psychology was in its infancy, and people were still figuring out what to make of the idea that we have unconscious drives that can take over our lives, and the idea that the mind might be an object of scientific study, like planets or molecules. The thought: what if the mind is something that we can actually program, like a machine? or take apart? What if, generally, there is a technique out there that will cause a person to give up his secrets, not via hit-or-miss questioning, but the way a key unlocks a door? -- was all over the place.

They were looking for that key, and they suspected the Soviets had found it.

"Thanks, Hilzoy for this very detailed, documented observation and analysis of the effects of sensory deprivation (also observed in U.S. prisons, as you remarked...)"

That last phrase conflates the two experiences to a point of being somewhat misleading. Prisons, for all their horrors, and even in Super-Max, don't do this, as Hilzoy aptly quoted above:

[...] Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.

Part of the point here is that these techniques are, in fact, orders of magnitude stronger than anything found in mere imprisonment, and that are consciously applied to break down the subject's mind each day; this is not, in fact, something found in ordinary prisons.

The KUBARK manual was written in 1963 (drawing on earlier work from the Fifties), which is how we were able to read chunks of it, and about it, back in the Seventies, when it was written up in various books and magazine articles; I'm not in the least defending George Bush, but it's a complete mistake, if you're horrified about it, to put the blame solely on George W. Bush, and to think that these issues will magically disappear in two years.

If you want to blame a President for KUBARK and American use of such techniques, blame Eisenhower (and to some degree Truman and Kennedy) first.

It would be nice to think that this sort of thing can all be neatly tucked under the heading of "George W. Bush," and that it goes away with him, but that would be completely wrong; even if Congress and a saintly new President sweep away all use of such techniques sometime in the next decade, the manuals and techniques will just be waiting for yet another President to find the need.

Gary, I don't think there's all that much conflation wrt the SuperMax isolation cells in which the light is always on, in which everything is painted white, in which there is no window or radio or television or human contact. Those seem every bit as dangerous.

Those conditions were first tested in the early 1980s on political/terror prisoners, Puerto Rican nationalists.

The HNN link is to an article by Alfred McCoy, whose book A Question of Torture somehow showed up in my public library in Ridgeland, Mississippi. Not "definitive" or anything, but very much worth a read, for those interested/appalled.

If they were "every bit as dangerous," Nell, terrible as they are, why would there be a need for all the additional techniques that KUBARK uses, that are applied as forms of disorientation, and questioning, on a daily basis, to the people in CIA custody? (The same is true of the earlier KGB practices, and of the North Koreans.)

There actually is a terrible, on the one hand, and an even worse, on the other, here.

Considering that the mind control experiments have proven nothing other than that it is possible to deliberately drive someone insane, the only conceivable use for these tactics is sadistic. Manuals written in the early 60s were written before the tactic was totally discredited (as anything other than sadism).

We can't make the manuals disappear, anymore than we can make sadists and psychopaths disappear. But we can do our best to choose non-insane, non-idiot, non-sadists to run our country. We can also not keep supporting them when they reveal themselves as such.

To some extent, the intelligence agencies and military will always attract more than a normal share of psychopaths, though I was surprised and relieved by the numbers of people in those services who've loudly and strenuously repudiated torture. Torture is not an accepted mode for interrogation, even among people whose notions of what's acceptable are based on pragmatism rather than ethical concerns.

For that reason, I dispute the notion that "any other President" will inevitably find a need for those techniques. It is not our inescapable fate to elect idiots and monsters to high office.

Okay, Gary, you are right about the degrees. My point is that conditions in some supermax isolation units are as effective in bringing about the breakdown of people condemned to them as the KUBARK techniques, just not as rapid.

Hilzoy, I envy your strength of mind, as well as your reasonableness and generosity in attributing motives (or explanations) for actions. It's likely the two are related. An inspiration to try to resist settling on worst-case explanations.

There are moments when I allow myself to believe that a significant enough part of the American public will develop a real understanding of what we've done to thousands of people in the last few years, and the connection to our history over the last sixty years. Sometimes I go so far as to believe in the possibility that that understanding will produce a change not only in detainee policy but in domestic prison conditions and imprisonment policies and rates in general.

Nell: you're right about the supermax's potential for horror. There's a chart I tried to include in the post, but when I tried to clip it out of the article it kept coming out all black. (Apparently, my graphics program has a sense of irony.) Here it is in text: symptoms, and then the proportion of the supermax prisoners under study who have them:

"Manuals written in the early 60s were written before the tactic was totally discredited (as anything other than sadism)."

I'm unclear: if you are asserting that such methods are utterly ineffective in making people disclose information they wouldn't have wanted to when they started, rather than that such methods shouldn't be used by human beings are other human beings, or some other argument as regards humanitarian concerns, I'm unaware of what source you have in mind to discredit the effectiveness of such techniques.

In fact, the techniques work pretty well. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but I know of no reason to think so. But perhaps I misunderstand you.

Please note that this is a very different question from, say, whether torture is, overall, an effective (setting aside the moral questions for a moment) policy for a nation. For a great many reasons, I don't believe it is. But that's a different question from whether regression can be induced in someone. It can.

Well, the research into how wonderfully effective N. Korea was at "breaking people" and what we could learn from their techniques stemmed partly from a bunch of FALSE confessions that U.S. soldiers made--see ch. 7 of the Margulies book. It does make people "disclose" information, but there is no particular reason to believe that information is true--as with any other form of abuse when you break people's will they tell you what you want to hear, and unless you have some independent way of verifying it a lot of it is going to be crap.

It was actually a joint Canadian, British, US effort, top-secret effort, and Dr Donald O. Hebb at McGill University found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in a subject within 48 hours.

Wow. For those who don't know, Donald Hebb articulated one of the fundamental axioms of modern neuroscience: cells that fire together wire together. Within the field he has been awarded the ultimate accolade: the usage of his name as a lower-case adjective, as in hebbian learning. I knew he was a psychologist by trade, but I had no idea he did this kind of experiment.

Gary: I will be getting to this, eventually, but: there's overwhelming evidence that these techniques are effective at doing something. I'm sure that the effect of that something is, at times, that someone reveals stuff s/he wouldn't have wanted to reveal. But there's very little evidence that it's effective at getting people to reveal the truth, as they know it.

I think the Religious Right needs to know that the torture manuals they endorse in such Christlike fashion are based on a Darwinistic worldview. Not that the most extreme elements would care, seeing as how George W. Bush is a good Christian man and therefore infallible and all.

"It does make people 'disclose' information, but there is no particular reason to believe that information is true"

Quite so. Of course, any information under any interrogation circumstances must be approached understanding that, as well. That's why I'm distinguishing between what's desirable/undesirable national policy, and whether or not these techniques can induce regression; they're very different questions. Arguing that the techniques do not succeed at inducing regression, and a lot of talking, isn't a useful line of argument for shutting down torture as a policy, convenient as that would be. Arguing for the long list of reasons why torture remains terrible policy is useful.

Hilzoy: "But there's very little evidence that it's effective at getting people to reveal the truth, as they know it."

Yes. But that argument won't shut down those who will observe that all intelligence tips and information must be cross-checked and verified to be of worth, so by itself it's an insufficient argument. It's only when brought into the larger context of the many reasons why torture is bad policy that that point becomes truly useful.

"I think you get a sig. higher proportion of false information with abusive techniques,"

Depends. An actually guilty spy or terrorist will, after all, under normal circumstances, be trying their utmost to be deceptive. It's hard to get a higher proportion than "100% of what matters."

But this is missing the larger point: arguing what national policy should be about torture and abusive techniques on the basis only of effectiveness isn't a route that's reliably going to get us where we want to be, and it gets us into all sorts of detours to places we don't want to be (like, hey, if a technique proves at least partially effective, than it's okay, even if the subject is left a semi-vegetable!).

"Depends. An actually guilty spy or terrorist will, after all, under normal circumstances, be trying their utmost to be deceptive. It's hard to get a higher proportion than "100% of what matters."

This is the sort of "well obviously this is how terrorists behave" observation that does not actually seem to completely mesh with what actual interrogators say.

I am no interrogator, neither are you, so I don't think either of us can convince the other.

I think the ineffectiveness of torture is INTERTWINED WITH its moral problems. One way I think it's related is what it does to the interrogator--my hunch is that if you are waterboarding a guy because you believe it's necessary to get information, you are not going to treat that information with the skepticism you would if he was just bullsh*tting you in the way you'd expect a terrorist to do. Also, the false information obtained under torture is going to be given because the prisoner decides this is what the interrogator wants to hear--which, again, is more likely to be believed than KSM or whoever just spinning yarns. And then the abuse seems to become an end in itself, to the point where people aren't even asking questions.

I think the lack of effectiveness and immorality are inseparable. It's delusional to think that these techniques are going to be used by "trained professionals" who will torture only as much as they need to be effective and no more. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the original justifications for it get thrown right out the window. It's amazing the degree to which KUBARK talks about "breaking" people to get this information without any examination at all about whether it is true--and the way they seem impressed by the "effectiveness" of e.g. North Korean technqiues even though most of the confessions produced were completely false.

So I don't think you argue effectiveness in a vaccuum, leaving morality out of it, but I also don't think you do the opposite. They're related.

"and the way they seem impressed by the 'effectiveness' of e.g. North Korean technqiues even though most of the confessions produced were completely false."

The confessions were for propaganda value; there actually wasn't all that much valuable information, for more than a few days, that soldiers on the ground, and in the air above, Korea, had as regards military disposition and plans.

"So I don't think you argue effectiveness in a vaccuum, leaving morality out of it, but I also don't think you do the opposite. They're related."

This seems to have missed the point I was making about torture-as-a-policy being a separate question from whether regression can be induced. It can. That was my point. No one has argued against it; other arguments are other arguments, and I leave folks to them.

[...] Please note that this is a very different question from, say, whether torture is, overall, an effective (setting aside the moral questions for a moment) policy for a nation. For a great many reasons, I don't believe it is. But that's a different question from whether regression can be induced in someone. It can.

I was responding to this, which I guess I should have read more narrowly than I did: : "I'm unclear: if you are asserting that such methods are utterly ineffective in making people disclose information they wouldn't have wanted to when they started, rather than that such methods shouldn't be used by human beings are other human beings, or some other argument as regards humanitarian concerns...

I'm unaware of what source you have in mind to discredit the effectiveness of such techniques.

In fact, the techniques work pretty well."

I was assuming you meant "disclosing information" that was true, and the tecniques "work pretty well" to get accurate information, since if the confessions are not accurate the techniques do not in fact "work pretty well" towards any legitimate goal. And you then argued back at me that there was nothing in particular about torture that would make information less accurate. And then said the "larger point" was something else.

I was assuming you meant "disclosing information" that was true, and the tecniques "work pretty well" to get accurate information,

I said neither things; yes, you assumed. I further carefully elaborated on what I was and was not saying.

That was since if the confessions are not accurate the techniques do not in fact "work pretty well" towards any legitimate goal.

I didn't say a thing about "legitimate goal[s], either.

I really wish people wouldn't decide I must mean something I didn't write, because they imagine it's what I must have meant, let alone when I've specifically disclaimed such an interpretation in advance.

"And you then argued back at me that there was nothing in particular about torture that would make information less accurate."

I said absolutely no such thing.

I thought this was clear:

[...] Please note that this is a very different question from, say, whether torture is, overall, an effective (setting aside the moral questions for a moment) policy for a nation. For a great many reasons, I don't believe it is. But that's a different question from whether regression can be induced in someone. It can.

Okay, you were responding to CaseyL, not Katherine, but that doesn't really change anything. All I'm saying is that it's not surprising that people are confused when you carry on an argument against a point that no one is making.

I would have changed it to a comma, but there were two sentences, so it still wouldn't have worked. I realize I would have had to rearrange things somehow to get it into an edited publication. I apologize for offending your esthetic sense.

Ah, but blockquotes in the middle of sentences offend my esthetic sense slightly more than in-line quoted sentences in the middle of sentences do -- thus the need for rearrangement to put the quote at the end, however it was going to be formatted (if I hadn't been feeling lazy).

Being a programmer and former technical editor makes my views on strings enclosed by quotation marks a little different from some copyeditors'.

According to the McCoy book, the CIA's interest in these techniques grew out of the postwar "confessions" of eastern European leaders who'd done a turn in KGB prisons, and of course the North Korean "brainwashing" that Gary mentions.

At first, we couldn't believe that chemicals weren't being used. But research showed that sensory & sleep deprivation did the trick just fine.

So, our interest in these methods *from the beginning* was their utility for false confessions.

"So, our interest in these methods *from the beginning* was their utility for false confessions."

I really don't want to sound like I'm defending anything -- but probably someone will assume that's what I "really mean," which I don't -- but it's not at all clear to me that the jump from your first two paragraphs, which are correct, to your third paragraph's assertions, is supported by the historical record. Do you have some cites from the Forties/Fifties to support it? I'd be extremely interested, but also surprised, to see them, and learn that I was unaware of them.

As I recall, the motivation was threefold, more or less. In no particular order: a) explore the limits of possibilities of interrogation (without direct use of pain as a primary tool); b) find out what it was possible for the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/anyone to accomplish as regards "brainwashing" and psychological methods, drugs, regression, etc.; c) part of the motivation for that was to attempt to better understand how well or not our own agents could withstand interrogation, and part was to see what could be accomplished as regards the enemy.

I don't recall that there were a lot of memos/talk about obtaining false confessions, but I certainly grant that I'm not remotely all-knowing on the topic -- merely well-read -- and it's entirely possible I've forgotten stuff or missed it.

But I assume you can support your statement about the Forties/Fifties ("*from the beginning*") with some cites?

Andreson: add to Gary's (b) my much earlier comment -- I think that a very bizarre idea of what "the science of the mind" might accomplish was out there, and we thought that things like the detailed (false) confessions by US airmen in the Korean war showed not just that you could break people into tiny little pieces, but that you could somehow gain control of their minds and maneuver them around like robot cars. (OK, I exaggerate, but not much. Think of The Manchurian Candidate.)

I mean: it wasn't just that the airmen confessed; it was that they gave elaborate, detailed confessions that were way more than the sullen monosyllables you might expect from "normal" beatings and the like.

Andreson: add to Gary's (b) my much earlier comment -- I think that a very bizarre idea of what "the science of the mind" might accomplish was out there, and we thought that things like the detailed (false) confessions by US airmen in the Korean war showed not just that you could break people into tiny little pieces, but that you could somehow gain control of their minds and maneuver them around like robot cars. (OK, I exaggerate, but not much. Think of The Manchurian Candidate.)

I mean: it wasn't just that the airmen confessed; it was that they gave elaborate, detailed confessions that were way more than the sullen monosyllables you might expect from "normal" beatings and the like.

I should point out that the pedigree of these confessions goes back past the Korea war and perhps should be related to the 1930's show trials in the Soviet Union. I am not sure how they were able to elicit detailed confessions that were completely untrue, but as I understand it, there was an absence of physical torture, so I imagine the same sorts of techniques must have been used.

That's my recollection from the McCoy A Question of Torture book, which I don't have before me. I or it could be mistaken.

I mean: it wasn't just that the airmen confessed; it was that they gave elaborate, detailed confessions that were way more than the sullen monosyllables you might expect from "normal" beatings and the like.

Right, hence the guess that chemicals, etc. must've been used. I think Gary's right that we were interested in protecting our own people from being "brainwashed," but IIRC, both sides of the coin were on our minds pretty early. This was the era when it was popular to see an unfolding war of propaganda (er, "persuasion") that would decide the fate of the world.

LJ: perhps should be related to the 1930's show trials in the Soviet Union

Absolutely; tho some of those victims were beaten etc. as well, the beatings weren't decisive. I am curious what entity, if any, in the U.S. gov't took the kind of interest in those "trials" that the CIA would later display in their postwar kin.

I'd just like to point out that Al McCoy is actually a Philippine historian (!) as well as an expert on the international drug trade (he first came to prominence documenting "The Politics of Heroin in Indochina"), the Australian mafia (?!), and just about anything else he puts his formidable energy to. I get tired just thinking about him sometimes.

We're not all useless layabouts who stake out a really obscure corner of knowledge and then do as little as possible, waiting for some unwary fool to stumble into our Lair Of Expertise.

"...but as I understand it, there was an absence of physical torture, so I imagine the same sorts of techniques must have been used."

Also just simple blackmail/coercion, as in threats to kill people's families, and the like.

Plus, it can't be underestimated how many people simply bought into the system, and the Revolution, back in the Twenties and Thirties, and thus duly did, in many cases, what Authority Instructed. For the Good Of The Party, after all.

"I am curious what entity, if any, in the U.S. gov't took the kind of interest in those 'trials' that the CIA would later display in their postwar kin."

There really wasn't anything resembling an intelligence agency in the U.S. looking at the Soviet Union in the Thirties. The closest entity was the State Department, which had an observer in Finland, prior to FDR recognizing the USSR in 1933, after which we had a small number of diplomats in Moscow, of course.

Other than that, pretty much nada, other than maybe a couple of folks in Army Intelligence informally reading up now and again. I could be missing something, but offhand, I can't think what it might be. The FBI's foreign intelligence involvement under Hoover started off in Latin America, not Europe, and didn't really get going until the Forties. And before WWII, other than the cryptographic operation of WWI that had been shut down, the only other intelligence was from Army Intelligence, and Navy Intelligence (which had, understandably, no interest in the Soviet Union).

Domestically, of course, with the Red Scares starting back in the WWI era, under Attorney-General Palmer, lots of attention was paid to "Reds," but there just wasn't much of anything done about the Soviet Union, per se (after the Intervention was over, that is, but there wasn't much intelligence involved in that, in very possible meaning of the word).

One of my friends is serious into state government and budget statistics and he reels off something ludicrous about the Wisconsin state budget and Supermax -- something like the Supermax budget is the fastest growing line item in Wisconsin with expenditures exceeding all non-tertiary education. I'll ask him about it when I see him next.

First, torturers probably end up being those who like it - the sadism and power. Ordinary people probably burn out rather quickly. So the idea of objective torture is probably wrong; these guys *like* it, and were doing as much as they could get away with.

Second, when torturing somebody, how does one know when one has the answers sought? There are two obvious ways; first, the answers given are what the people in charge expect/want; the second is that the victim is dead or otherwise incapacitated, and so no further information could be obtained.

There's a chapter of Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' floating around on the web. It's the one about how the KGB obtained confessions. It's very informative, both for how they were able to obtain confessions without official torture, and for the bureaucratic obsession with confessions.

To Hilzoy and Gary :
For once this subject is one that I have some competency to discuss : as for experimental psychology, I refer both of you to the work of René Spitz, in The First Year of Life, particularly the passage discussing Emotional Deficiency Diseases in the Infant, also called Hospitalism (yes, Gary, I know that this paper addresses the formation of normal object relations in the infant, but I believe that the deterioration of personality induced by sensory deprivation( (not to be confused with regression which is a normal functioning present in every human being, illustrated by the state of dreaming, for instance) )can also apply to adults). In "experiments" dating from 1946 Spitz pinpointed and described the effects of meaningful human relationships in the care of infants in a postwar daycare center. He found that an "efficient" system where infants were physically taken care of, changed (often by interchangeable personnel) but received minimal physical and emotional contact, the infants pined, and many developed serious physical illnesses, withdrawal, resulting in irreparable psychological damage (hospitalism).
Why do I bring up this study ? Because contrary to what most laypeople believe, a one to one hands on torture experience is paradoxically more liable to keep a subject psychologically alive (not physically, of course) than the impersonal, diffuse sensory deprivation involved, sorry, Gary, in supermax prisons in the U.S. where prison conditions are designed in order to reduce all contact to the strict minimum (trays arriving in grey cells by remote control) all this to "protect" inmates and guards.
As for the logic of this reasoning, can anyone explain to me why death row inmates who have no right to contact visits (they see their relatives behind plexiglass barriers) are subjected to full body searches (that's right, full body searches) after each visit ?
Sounds like sheer, unadulterated and unrecognized sadism to me...
And of course, any intelligent psychologist working for the military would have been in an excellent position to exploit Spitz's findings, even at the time.

"One of my friends is serious into state government and budget statistics and he reels off something ludicrous about the Wisconsin state budget and Supermax -- something like the Supermax budget is the fastest growing line item in Wisconsin with expenditures exceeding all non-tertiary education. I'll ask him about it when I see him next."

Trivial confusion/technical point: Supermax is in Florence, Colorado. It's the only federal Super-Max. (There are four state facilities deemed "Super-Max," in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia.)

The prison you're referring to in Wisconsin (Boscobel) is neither federal nor a lesser State super-max, any more, but "merely" a Maximum Security prison, having been downgraded (but only in the past year, which is why it's entirely reasonable for you to have heard what you heard).

Tho weirdly, even at the Florence CO Supermax, the Unabomber gets to write erudite letters to the NY Review of Books, suggesting a fair access to books as well. (On laptop while out of town, so forgive me if I don't provide a link -- google should work.)

I just finished reading all three parts of this horrible situation. You're research is impeccable, and must be applauded.

One thing I need to note. In your description of the Mosaic Theory, you don't mention one important point: How do the interrogators even know if detainees are telling them the truth? What do interrogators do to verify information given by detainees? How far can you press a detainee before you completely lose his mind?

This strategy seems to be really the most wasteful strategy in terms of a real commodity. These detainees might know some things that might be valuable to us. Instead of trying to purposefully completely destroy their minds, why not instead treat them with the utmost respect and wealth (hello, these are Afghan poppy farmers; I'm sure they'd love a few American amenities!). Not only would you have a better chance of getting more accurate information, but you also save a life. It would seem the better way to go.

Just why are we so wasteful with the human mind....unless...well, that's a dark road to take if we consider the alternative reason to why we would do such a thing.